All right everyone, your best Katherine Hepburn impersonations, please, as we say together, “The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower, suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day and now I place them here in memory of something that has died.”* The cycle of life and death…

This is not ANOTHER recently discovered Shakespeare portrait, this is fab Frenchman Francois de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), who said, “To eat is a necessity but to eat intelligently is an art.” Art is not always easy to pull off, especially when you’re hungry. That’s because your stomach has its own brain. The technical term…

French-kissing cows are the logo for Les Halles, the Franco-American steakhouse in New York, Washington DC and Miami. If you go tomorrow night, I can recommend the petatou, a warm goat cheese and potato salad, the lovely salade d’Auvergene, with arugula, apples, walnuts and blue cheese, a very decadent macaroni and cheese or the healthier…

I comfort myself by believing in chaos theory, that seemingly unrelated events are linked. A garden in Milwaukee can have consequences for a girl in Miami. There is a great shiny matrix of connection, something that binds us all. You just have to be open to the signs. There’s the rub. But I’ve been seeing…

To celebrate today, I wanted to create a new recipe that’s beyond green. Sure, you’re wearing green because it’s St. Patrick’s Day and that’s what one does. That’s lovely, but even better is the green you wear inside. I’m talking about the eating of the green — green as in environmentally aware and green as…

Fabulous art courtesy of the fabulous Philip Brooker. I got thinking about banana bread this morning when I saw the bananas on the kitchen counter had gone all black and gnarly. This is a good thing — tired, past-their-prime bananas are what distinguish a superior banana bread from its pale, dry imitations. My grandmother’s…